The Frozen Rabbi (13 page)

Though he’d always had a healthy respect for traditional religious prohibitions, Shmerl began to look furtively into mystical and alchemical texts. In a corner of the mildewed study house he pored over books reserved for householders past the age of forty. Grown restless with the thorny dialectics of pilpul discourse, Shmerl secretly attended the third meal at the home of a local Chasidic rebbe, a rancid old gentleman whose beard was sprinkled with fried groats. In his homily the rebbe declared: “Is not a figure of speech, God’s longing for His feminine aspect, his Holy Shekhinah, which since the destruction of the Second Temple is exiled along with the Israelites.” It was an ongoing drama with regard to which the sage exhorted his disciples to play matchmaker to the reunion of haShem with His better half. Seized with a desire to participate in this cosmic romance, Shmerl began to research ways of actively promoting the reunion, which would bring an end to Diaspora and raise the fallen earth to the height of the celestial Jerusalem.

Using as his handbook a volume called
Sefer Sheqel ha-Qodesh
by the medieval kabbalist Moses de Leon, he began to clear cobwebs from the interior of the tumbledown storage shed behind his father’s junk shop. In lieu of the called-for crucibles, alembics, and bird-beaked vases, he culled from among items deemed too shoddy even for the shlockmonger’s shop an array of patched pots and dusty bottles. Discovering in himself a heretofore unrealized knack for construction, he stacked broken bricks in an inverted funnel to approximate an open-hearth stove. Raw materials such as copper and zinc lay around in abundance, but for the substances he would need as catalysts in his transformational processes, he appealed to the barber and chemist Avigdor the Apostate. A freethinker with a cynical view of his community’s naïveté, Avigdor nevertheless stocked his shelves with jars of leeches and quack remedies to humor his superstitious clientele. Accustomed as he was to strange requests, however, the fox-faced apothecary (known to have eaten shellfish) was unused to yeshiva bochers inquiring after quicksilver, powdered lodestone, and cinnabar, to say nothing of rare herbs such as ypericon. When asked what he planned to do with these items, Shmerl was prepared with a story about a correspondence chemistry course, a pursuit he thought the freethinker would approve of. It was in any case easier than explaining that he meant to perform, in microcosm, processes that the universe might then repeat writ large. Naturally Avigdor was not deceived, but sensing mischief on the part of the boy (and curious to see where his activities would lead), he accepted an oxidized flatiron and the skeleton of a parasol in exchange for the desired ingredients.

“In the interest of advancing secular education,” said the apothecary, with a wry tilt to his lips.

Of course, Shmerl might simply have prayed for change as the Jews had done for generations. But in heated competition with his fanciful nature was a pragmatic temperament that refused to make hard distinctions between the miraculous and the purely technical. And now that in adolescence the scales seemed to have fallen from his eyes, he saw clearly that the Jews of Shpinsk, and by extension the whole Pale of Settlement, were in urgent need of salvation; there was a compelling demand for heroic action on the part of some passionate young idealist. Everywhere he looked Shmerl saw men and women compared to whom his own affliction was negligible. There were boys his age who’d hacked off digits and wrecked their insides from drinking lye to exempt themselves from the draft, old men who’d been kidnapped as children by agents of the czar from whose army they returned decades later like hungry ghosts. Malnourished infants whimpered while their mothers went mad from the vermin that swarmed in their sheitl wigs. The centuries of persecution and degradation had left the Jews physically and morally depleted, their prayers ineffectual. What was required now was yichud, a conjunctio, the union of heaven and Earth that would transform the Jews of Shpinsk into a robust and beatific species, their constitutions as hardy as those of Russian muzhiks.

His initial efforts were inauspicious. In an attempt to extract the Fifth Essence, called the Elixir of Life, from a mixture of ground antimony and dog waste distilled in a battered samovar, Shmerl produced instead a drizzle of vile gray liquid afloat with crescents like cuticles. He took a cautious sip and puked, then waited in vain for his spine to straighten and his mind to expand in boundless clairvoyance. His disappointment was accompanied by vertigo and a weakness in the knees, which buckled under him, leaving him in a heap on the cold clay floor of the shed. That was how his father, come to investigate the rumor of a trespasser in his storehouse, found his oldest son. With a host of other sons too numerous to keep track of, Todrus and his wife, the footsore Chana Bindl, were generally too preoccupied with making ends meet to concern themselves with the shenanigans of their spawn. A crafty type with an eye for the favorable prospect, Todrus took in at a glance the condition of his son, along with the furnace and the urn spouting copper tubing, the jar of cloudy liquid resting on an anvil. His nose twitched at the scent and, dipping a pinkie into the jar, he dabbed his tongue then lifted the jar to quaff its contents, after which he breathed fire and pronounced Shmerl’s elixir (“Batampt!”) a perfectly serviceable schnapps. He cuffed the boy’s ear for engaging in unlawful acts, then ordered him to begin the immediate manufacture of his potion by the barrel, and later Todrus hauled in a squiffy rabbi to bless the distillery. This was the beginning of Shmerl’s temporary enslavement to his father’s bootleg operation, on the merits of which Todrus converted his junkshop into a provisional tavern. It was a short-lived venture, however, since his son’s mephitic cordial turned out to have debilitating side effects, such as temporary blindness.

In the meantime Shmerl persisted in his experiments, whose results remained unsatisfactory. While he would have preferred to work in solitude, now that his labors were popular gossip, he was often surrounded by inquisitive siblings eager to offer themselves as guinea pigs. Though he tried to discourage them, his little brothers made a game of snatching up his decoctions fresh from the still and swilling them neat. One of them, the web-toed Mushy, was confined to the outhouse for hours during which he lost his baby fat and the ability to laugh; whereas the eight year-old Gronim was seized with a steely erection that kept his little petsl stiff for a day and a night. Then came the explosion that formally concluded the alchemical phase of Shmerl’s investigations. He had been hoping to recreate the esh m’saref, the refiner’s fire that transmuted base elements into a liquid philosopher’s stone, which insured strength, health, and eternal youth and postponed death indefinitely. (It was a process also said to render common metals into gold, though Shmerl had no interest in that particular consequence.) He was cooking sulphur together with charcoal and saltpeter in the brick furnace, and had a pulverized rind of ethrog on hand to feed the growing flames, when a blast occurred that blew out the flimsy wall of Todrus’s storeroom. Burning debris sprayed a salvo of torches over the swayback roofs of the Jewish quarter, causing the shingles to catch fire. The whole shtetl might have been consumed in a single conflagration had not the Water-Carriers Guild been summoned to form a bucket brigade from the town pump. Shmerl himself emerged from the rubble uninjured but black as pitch, his hair and eyebrows in patches where they hadn’t been singed away; his clothes were in shreds, his modesty protected only by the remnant of his knitted tallit koton. Appearing like some cacodemon hatched from one of his own makeshift retorts, he frightened the children and reinforced the general opinion that he had become a dabbler in the black arts, one to be shunned for looking into things he should not.

Around that time a maskil, a self-appointed representative of the Jewish Enlightenment, appeared in Shpinsk. He drove into town in an awning-covered caravan, a rattletrap conveyance run by a windy mechanism trailing fumes, which he parked on the market platz beside a vendor of cracked eggs. Then climbing onto the caravan in his frock coat and natty beard, he rolled back the awning to reveal a gallery of modern marvels as yet unseen in the Jewish Pale. He introduced to a skeptical crowd, among whom the young Shmerl Karpinski stood riveted, a gas turbine engine which he jerked into motion by revolving a dogleg crank. The resulting din caused babies to squawl and a draft horse to bolt in its traces. He exhibited neon gas in vacuum tubes linked together like glowing wurst, and an electromagnet entwined in a copper helix that pulled cutlery from a knife-sharpener’s sack several yards away. For a pièce de résistance he used his own ramrod body to conduct a direct current between a live wire in his left hand and a glass bulb in his right, thus challenging the light of the sun in an overcast sky. The crowd of mostly peasants, tradesmen, and truant children watched in rapt fascination, while the local Chasidim spat “Kaynehoreh!” against the evil eye. But for all the maskil’s disclaimers to the effect that the items he demonstrated had exclusively practical purposes, Shmerl—never keen on the distinction between science and magic—thought the power in these contrivances might be harnessed for more spiritual ends.

Banished from what was left of the storehouse and forced to keep out of his ill-tempered father’s sight, Shmerl had since reestablished his base of operations in the vine-tangled ambience of Yakov Chilblain’s abandoned flour mill. This was a spongy structure, nearly reclaimed by the surrounding vegetation, that the Shpinskers generally regarded as haunted; imps, it was said, rode the windmill’s ragged sails, and vampire bats flew out of the sack loft at night. But Shmerl was undeterred. A rationalist, he knew that imps and demons, though real enough, were merely pests that could be vaporized with the proper apparatus—such as a coil heated by electricity generated from a Voltaic pile composed of a stack of magnetized coins. (The coil also generated a hearthlike warmth, which was incidental.) He read about this phenomenon in
The Book of Wonders
that he’d obtained from the maskil along with a sheaf of diagrams in exchange for some waste product (a pearl?) from one of his former experiments. It was the first profane book that Shmerl had ever owned, and while initially he resisted opening it out of guilt, he was soon immersed in its illustrated descriptions of the technological revolution that was so late in arriving in Shpinsk. Then, rather than being put off by the book’s lack of a doctrinal bias, the boy set about discovering ways to render that catalogue of utilitarian inventions supremely impractical.

There followed a period of feverish industry. With a sense that he was doing work for which he’d been divinely ordained, Shmerl gathered tools and materials, and what he couldn’t locate in the detritus behind his father’s shop, he dispatched his little brothers to find. Natural scavengers (some might have called them thieves), they brought back to the mill odds and ends that might double as crankshafts, pistons, and connector rods; they hauled their acquisitions up the ladder into the creaking loft, where Shmerl hammered them into shapes that ultimately evolved into engine parts. From Kabbalah he’d learned of the peculiar faculty of the Holy Ari of Safed, who could liberate souls that in the course of their gilgul, their metempsychosis, had become trapped in random objects on earth. With that in mind he girded a railroad spike in an armature of brass, mounting it between the poles of electrified magnets, which caused the spike to spin like a dreidl. His little brothers scrounged horsehair brushes that Shmerl looped about a length of pipe, explaining as he worked the concept of a “pressure drop.” This was the inhalation that would occur between the rotating brushes and the vacuum formed from the effect of the spinning spike. He fastened the entire gizmo onto a blacksmith’s bellows, whose accordion frame he replaced with a canvas nose bag, then mounted the reverse bellows—dubbed di neshomah zoiger, the soul-sucker—on a garden cart, which he and his brothers pulled in broad daylight over the ruts of Sheep Dip Alley to the doorstep of the Karpinskis’ crumbling abode.

He’d determined that his family’s dwelling should be the first to be sanctified by scourging it of the souls wedged in its various fissures and crannies. Even before he’d said the appropriate blessing and connected the wires to the alkali cell, inciting a mechanized uproar, before he’d begun to aim the articulated stovepipe into the room’s obscurer corners, Shmerl had attracted a sizeable audience. Neighbors looked through the rag-stuffed windows and word soon reached the junkman and his wife, who came scurrying over from Todrus’s shop on the market square. What they saw when they joined the other rubbernecks was their son wrestling a fat silver serpent that dove beneath the hulking clay stove from which a hen was sent packing; it nosed among pickle casks, rattled the garlic braids, and burrowed into every recess of that cluttered house. Chana Bindl, high-strung and perpetually pregnant, swooned in a heap of dimity skirts, so that Todrus had to send to Avigdor’s for smelling salts. Then Shmerl, with an extravagant gesture, yanked the wires to break the circuit and removed the equine receptacle from the bellows, wrenching it open in the hope of setting free a cluster of imprisoned souls. He didn’t know exactly what such souls would look like, but was reasonably certain the dirt that spilled from his contraption onto the floor was not their residue. Chana Bindl, having been revived, grew distressed again at the revelation that the rooms she so scrupulously scoured had remained full of grime, while her husband stood chewing his whiskers, conflicted in his kippered heart. His son had become on the one hand a figure of derision whose notoriety extended even to the goyim, while on the other he’d conceived a machine that cleaned a house in a manner your besom or feather duster couldn’t have touched. Even as he lurched through clouds of dust to furl his fingers about Shmerl’s scrawny throat, the junk dealer asked him what it would take to construct a fleet of similar carpet sweepers.

But the downcast inventor judged his machine a failure of no redeeming metaphysical value, and assuring his father through a pinched windpipe that he could do whatever he wished with di neshomah zoiger, Shmerl was already contemplating a new direction for his research.
The Book of Wonders
in its outline of the history of aerodynamics declared that recent developments had taken technology to the very threshold of manned flight. Shmerl envisioned a wholesale exodus of the Jews, enabled through innovative engineering to make aliyah to the Upper Yeshiva without having to die. His own mistake, however, was to fix his propeller—fashioned from the windmill stocks whose shredded sails were replaced with taut muslin—to the interior rafters rather than the roof of the family’s hovel. He’d feared that instead of waking up in Paradise, his parents would open their eyes to a house with its roof torn asunder and midnight pouring in. As it was, the unholy racket roused Todrus and Chana Bindl from their rude mattress, whence they staggered forth in rumpled gowns to gaze blearily upon the thrashing blades. But even as the junkmonger sputtered and fumed, his wrath was checked by the breeze that cooled the room and fanned the brow of his agitated wife, who went directly into labor.